by Michael Snyder, End Of The American Dream:
It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the Military Industrial Complex to our society. It employs millions of people, and it brings in hundreds of billions of dollars each year. The Military Industrial Complex has always been one of the central pillars of our economy, and these days business is booming thanks to the war in Ukraine and the possibility of a war with China. Needless to say, those that run the Military Industrial Complex want the gravy train to continue, and so politicians that are pro-war are showered with campaign contributions. In both major parties, politicians that are pro-war greatly outnumber those that are anti-war, and that is not likely to change any time soon.
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Smedley D. Butler fought in four major conflicts, and in 1935 he astutely observed that “war is a racket”…
“WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
Of course the statements that he made back then are even more true today.
If the Military Industrial Complex suddenly disappeared, it would leave a giant, gaping hole in our economy that would be extremely difficult to fill. In an excellent piece that he posted earlier this week, Richard C. Cook shared some numbers about the Military Industrial Complex that are absolutely astounding…
Today about 2.1 million people are employed by the defense industry. According to Acara Solutions, a major MIC recruiting firm, their average annual salary is $106,700, 40 percent higher than the national average. The companies they work for produced revenues in 2022 of $741 billion. How much of their production is high-priced junk, no one knows. The performance of U.S.-produced armaments in the Ukraine conflict does not seem impressive. No modern U.S. weapons have ever been tested in an industrial-type war against an equal adversary.
The MIC also includes active-duty uniformed personnel of 1.37 million and reserves of 849,000. There are 750 U.S. military bases in more than 80 countries outside of the U.S. More than 100,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed in Europe. Annual salary and benefits of the military are currently $146 billion per year, escalating with COLAs compounded at two to three percent annually, sometimes more. Some former U.S. military personnel are assumed to be fighting in Ukraine as mercenaries or helping direct the fighting from safe locations like Kiev or Lvov.
Then there are the civilian employees. According to the DoD, it employs more than 700,000 civilians “in an array of critical positions worldwide,” with compensation totaling about $70 billion. According to the Government Accountability Office, we may also add 560,000 contractor employees, whose compensation is typically higher than the career workforce.
We can also add hundreds of thousands of executives, managers, employees and contractors of the three-letter Deep State agencies, such as the CIA, NSA, DEA, FBI, and now DHS, etc., who interface with the MIC day in and day out and are part of the same fabric of state-sanctioned force and enemy identification and interdiction.
In the entire history of the world, we have never seen anything quite like this.
And the Military Industrial Complex absolutely loves Joe Biden, because he has promised to keep the war in Ukraine going “for as long as it takes”…
It is likely that billions of people around the world view the conflict in Ukraine as a proxy war being waged by the U.S. against Russia. US President Joe Biden has pledged to aid Ukraine’s pursuit of victory “for as long as it takes,” without defining what the end state might be. Russian President Vladimir Putin has interpreted U.S. intentions to mean a fight “to the last Ukrainian.”
Unfortunately, there is a problem.
The Ukrainians are running out of warm bodies.
They have literally been grabbing men off the streets and throwing them into vans, but we didn’t care because it wasn’t our sons that were being forced to go to war.
Many Americans cheered when the Ukrainians began their ill-fated “counter-offensive”, but it turned out to be a disaster.
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